Comment by tauntz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tauntz | Hacker News Reader

  > Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head

This might sound like I'm crazy but this brings back memories of a strange experience from some years ago that I can't really explain other than "coincidence".. but in the light of this article I started to think.. is it?

Me and my gf were really tired and both exactly in this "almost sleeping but not quite" state. We were lying down with our heads touching (my left temple touching her right temple.. not exactly the temple but just to give a generic idea). We were still talking with each other but at the same time I was seeing random fragments of dreams and the reality was fading away and coming back occasionally. At some point I saw a dream(?) about an orange (I think.. or a ball) that grew bigger and bigger till almost everything was.. filled by it and at that moment my gf says something in the lines of ".. and then there's this huge orange ball coming at me and growing bigger". I woke up immediately and asked her to explain wtf just happened because she was seeing the exact same thing that I was seeing at exactly the same time.

Could it be that one of our brains was picking up the brain waves of the other (..the brains were so close together after all :)) and as our consciousness was fading between being asleep.. it didn't filter out this random interference and interpreted it in the same way, producing the same dream like encounter? Was she, in essence, "reading my mind"? Am I crazy? :)

Consider an alternative hypothesis? In your hypnagogic state, your brain actually produced an image based on what she described to you, then reordered the chronology of events so that it seemed to you like you imagined the image before she described it. Not too dissimilar from deja vu.

It's well known that brains can sometimes reorder the chronology of events, especially if they occur within a short time window.

Thanks, I haven't thought of this but it sounds plausible as well.

Also see Déjà Rêvé.

I was thinking even simpler: Maybe she started talking about the orange ball earlier, but he was asleep (or mostly asleep) at that point, and so started dreaming about it. Then he woke up at the last bit of the story.

Interesting. I've had several strange experiences in the last year which could be explained this way (as I have no other way to explain me "seeing the future"). In one example, my brain told me there was a 5 euro note under a chair at a cafe, and then I looked, saw it and picked it up. In another example, I saw a fruit had fallen from a tree and imagined an older man come and pick it up and then look up at the tree. This exact thing occurred 10 seconds later.

Other weird experiences include living in a new country and having at least 20 instances of deja vu there within a short time (not of having been there, but just random moments I had seen before in my head).

I had a cognitive science professor relate a story about a similar liminal dream. He had a long dream about a visit to the library. Every element of the dream built to someone yelling "look up!" and when he did, he saw a large book falling right towards him, so he was about to knock it out of the way. He woke to find a book falling from a high shelf right above his head - and his hand already extended to knock it away.

Did he have a prophetic dream? Probably not. Probably he saw the book through barely-open eyes and his brain generated and stored the entire dream instantaneously and he only thought he had experienced it in normal time.

Like another poster said, your brain may have re-ordered the order of events. I remember something similar happening to me, but it wasn't another person talking, which allowed me to figure out that re-ordering happened.

I was dosing off while my family was still up. It was a short dream in which I was playing tennis. It was only 2 or 3 strokes, but I woke up with a start just as the ball hit the court surface. Turns out that someone dropped something nearby. I assume my brain heard it, played out the tennis match dream synchronizing the tennis ball hitting the court with something being dropped.

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